


Normalcy (and other things we lost)

by Timeskipped



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Minor Violence, Post-Canon, VLR timeline, or something like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 00:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20898386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timeskipped/pseuds/Timeskipped
Summary: For Phi, she spent three and a half months collecting memories from the morphogenetic field.For Sigma, he spent 45 years waiting to see her again.





	Normalcy (and other things we lost)

Phi is sitting alone in the B. Garden with the lights off when the door opens. The creaking old metal sounds oddly mechanical, something out of place among the gentle rustling of a simulated wind and the rushing of a waterfall. She’s grown to ignore the other strange things about it; the constant whirring of fans, the lack of animals.

She looks through the darkness, lit up by glow-in-the-dark stars in the stream, and sees Sigma standing there.

He looks the same as when she first met him, his artificial eye and silver hair standing out from her memories from Dcom, but it makes sense; he’s gone through 45 years and changed accordingly. It’s strange that he’s more similar personality-wise to the version of him she knew at Dcom, but it’s not unpleasant. Just different. She breathes out as he settles his old body down beside her.

“You know, this room would be nicer with the light on. The night mode was mostly made for the puzzle.” His voice is friendly, almost teasing.

Phi huffs in return. “Yeah, you should probably get some sunlight, old man. I, however, have only been here a few days, so, since I was outside recently, the sun is unnecessary.” She tilts her head up, staring at the screens covering the ceiling. They simulate a sky with no stars.

She wasn’t on Earth for the nuclear fallout, but she imagines that this might be what it looks like from down there, if a bit more red. A bit more deadly.

“That’s not a problem,” Sigma says, scratching the side of his head. “I’ve been here for a long time. I know how to handle things.”

Phi hums. Sigma stays silent.

“So…” Phi starts. She knows that she has something to say, the thing that she came here to ponder, but she doesn’t look at Sigma. It’s too weird, and inexplicable nervousness bursts in her chest. “You know, I just lived through Dcom a few months ago. And… I remember some things from other timelines other than this one. Figured it out through the morphogenetic field after that whole thing imploded.” She waves a hand, as if it doesn’t matter.

Sigma sighs. Phi looks back to him, hoping he’ll say something. He doesn’t, so she just looks at his robotic eye. It’s glowing slightly, and Phi thinks that maybe it has to do with being able to see in this darkness. She’ll have to ask when doing that won’t just be avoiding what she has to say.

She steels herself. “You’re my father, right?”

“Perhaps,” Sigma says, which isn’t an answer.

“Wow, you're really going to play innocent?” Phi raises an eyebrow. “Real delicate. Leave your daughter out here with no answers.” The words are more playful than bitter.

“I didn’t exactly raise you,” Sigma replies, face tightening slightly. “I don’t see what we need to talk about.”

Phi sighs, leaning back against the bench and letting her muscles relax. “Really? We've been apart for months, _years_ on your end, and I know that you were so affected by my death that you named a child after me. And you're _really_ claiming that we have nothing to talk about?”

Sigma is silent for a moment that stretches on for so long that Phi is almost afraid he's not going to continue at all. “...You shouldn't have died,” he says, finally. His voice is old, tired, seeping into the rustling of leaves.

He's one with this moon base. Phi is not. She's just an outsider, an abnormal girl asking him to be honest when he has no obligation.

“I'd rather that have happened,” the images stain the inside of her brain; flashing red lights and burning, searing pain as she presses up against the glass and tells Diana and Sigma that she loves them, “than the alternative.”

A bang, ringing out. Sigma’s head splattered in red, no longer held up by his own will. Diana, collapsing as Phi realizes what she's done.

Phi can remember through the morphogenetic field how her tears dripped, how she grabbed Diana’s collar in her shaky hands and yelled, as if that would make Sigma come back, as if that would help the person who meant the most to her throughout every history she knows.

“No, you idiot!” Sigma turns to her with a glare. “There are universes where both of us lived. The ones where we died, where either of us died, they don't matter. Not… not anymore.” He looks away. “We're both here. We're both fine.”

Phi almost wants to refute it. If they don’t matter, then does it matter that she's here right now? She was only born in a timeline where she burns to death, after all, and that want to be alive is a part of wanting that timeline to matter.

But she keeps her mouth shut. She clenches her teeth, letting her thoughts be laced with the pain of their deaths.

All of this isn't fair. She came here because of looping timelines, and Radical-6, and to some extent her own decisions to fight against everything. But more than anything else, she's here because Akane found her. She's here because she was involved in the loop with that confusing woman.

If it had never existed, would someone else be here, in this garden? Would that person also feel the way her nails dig into her rough palms?

And where would a different Phi be in this other universe? Would she wonder why the world went so far downhill, back on Earth? More than that, would she still want desperately to be a version of herself who could end up in a world with both Sigma and Diana, and no death? The thought burns behind Phi’s eyes.

“I think I get it, why Alice and Clover are angry.” Phi’s voice drifts softly out into the garden. Everything happened so quickly, so Phi wasn’t given the chance to feel the weight of being an essential piece, but being back in the place where everything was revealed pulls it back. This conversation alone makes her understand the two of them better, why they left and why they had nothing to say to the old woman who Phi knew for only a few days, trying desperately to save the world.

“What do you mean?” Sigma asks.

“I mean, our whole lives were stolen from us. Not that we really had a choice, but…” She pauses. The anger at Akane isn't something she feels strongly. She understands what had to be done, why all of them were taken into the Nonary Game. And it's not an anger at Sigma, either. For Sigma, inexplicably, even though they were apart for so long, she cares too deeply for him in their shared history. The closest she gets is a kind of empty sadness for what's happened to him. It’s similar to how she feels for herself, sometimes. “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my parents, my adopted parents, in person. It’s just been rattling around in my brain this whole time: why us?”

“There’s no reason, I don’t think. We were able to SHIFT, so we got chosen, I guess.” Sigma shrugs it off easily, which calms Phi’s nerves. She’s been through a lot with him, throughout all the different timelines, only to end up in this one.

“...Yeah. Then it’s your fault, old man, since you’re the one who gave me this ability,” Phi smirks, tilting her head slightly. He may not have been involved how she was raised, but she can still take advantage of it.

Sigma smirks right back. “Hey, hey, don’t talk like that to your father!”

They laugh. It’s freeing, the outburst of air from Phi’s lungs, fresh and happy, because despite everything, they’re still the same. They’re alive.

“But really,” Phi says, smile still on her face, if only lightly, “Alice and Clover are going to go back in time, because they lost their chance at living, and we’re just going to… stay on the moon, I guess.” Her fingers tighten around the edge of her coat. The moon is familiar, but it’s not the ideal, not even for someone like Phi, who’s been running for the last three months.

“Do you want to go to Earth? Or back in time, again?” Sigma says, his voice serious. He looks at her. The two of them have time traveled so much that the question seems almost second nature.

Phi considers it for a moment. “No,” she meets his eyes steadily. “Do you? Now that the AB Project is over, you can.”

Sigma grins weakly. “The funny thing is,” he says, “I never even thought about that. I was always hoping that it would be a different me that ended up back here again… even if I knew that it was a possibility…” His voice trails off. He redirects his gaze into the shadows of the trees. Phi’s chest hurts.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean. It was always a different Phi and Sigma who had to deal with the end of the world, and now… if I go back to Earth, it’s not the Earth I knew.” Phi remembers Earth so vividly, it’s hard to believe that the red orb she can see when she leaves Rhizome-9 is really it. “I was asleep by the time the reactors exploded, and you’ve been here this whole time, not watching it or anything. Guess we’re moon buddies, huh?”

“What?”

“Oh, you know,” Phi says, sarcastically, “‘the man on the moon rules the infinite time?’ We’re on the moon, Sigma. Don’t tell me your memory got wiped when you SHIFTed back to being in an old man's body again.”

“Absolutely not. I was just thinking about what you said, and how Earth is different.” His eyebrows furrow. “We could always go down there again, form our own lives, all that. But… it doesn’t feel right to leave this place. This is what I worked for my whole life…”

“Your whole life? Weren’t you a college student?” Maybe the AB Project really is what Sigma’s been working towards, but Phi can’t imagine that he wasn’t once someone who wanted something completely different from his life.

She met him before he started those lonely 45 years, and she knows so many small things of him from the time in his life where he was a college student trapped in an unfamiliar place. She remembers thinking that he was a very strange old man, at the time, but now, with everything reoriented in her brain, she can feel a connection to him that spans across all the time they’ve known.

Sigma rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. It’s just been so long since I was a normal student that I can’t imagine it. And besides, it’s not exactly like I was forced to do all this. If there are timelines where I died, then there are timelines where I refused Akane’s request to spend 45 years for this. There has to be, right? Not being a normal student was a choice that I made a long time ago.”

His voice doesn’t even sound somber. He really had made that choice, and stuck with it. Huh.

Phi scoffs. “Yeah, you were kind of dumb like that when I first met you.” Willing to drop everything for the selfless life of the AB Project, even if it could result in his own death was definitely something she can see in the other Sigma she knew. “It was only a few months ago for me, but for you…”

“Yes. I spent 45 years changing without you, Phi.” His voice is matter-of-fact, but his tone lilts into something melancholy at the end. “...I missed you, during that time.”

“Oh.” Phi… hadn’t expected that. She looks away.

She’s not used to being missed. Not even by someone who she would give up her life for, like Sigma is. This feeling makes her want to sit here with him longer, but also to move, to help create a history where things were better for them, even if it's impossible now. To be more than just a variable in the equation towards saving the world.

“All that time, I was preparing to meet you again,” Sigma continues. “Not just you, but everyone, even if it was my past self who would’ve ended up seeing them. Spending all my time throwing myself at my research was grueling, but I got through it.”

“Do you regret it?” Phi can’t even imagine it. “If you had the choice to make different decisions, would you?”

“Depends on what you mean,” he says. “If I could’ve found a way to avoid Radical-6 being released, I would do it in a heartbeat, of course.” He smiles, not meeting her eyes. His hands reach up to touch his neck. Phi bets that he doesn’t want to reveal his own inner thoughts.

Phi wants to know, though. She lets out a short laugh, and opens her mouth to explain why she doesn’t understand, and why she _wants_ to understand. She wants to know why he did what he did, even with no real gain, except for another him.

“That’s a given. I mean… For me, I was born because of all this. I was always supposed to be a part of it. Even if I just decided not to go back to Crash Keys Headquarters on the day I was supposed to be frozen, I knew that that would be betraying the future. If I go back in time now, I’m basically a paradox in the making. But you… You were just Sigma Klim, some college kid who was unlucky enough to be chosen for kidnapping. You had no responsibility towards the world.”

“I had a responsibility towards you.”

That’s surprising. Phi raises her eyebrows, surprised at her own influence. It's good, though. It feels… warm. “Sigma…”

“Even before those years were spent here, I knew I had a responsibility for Luna and Kyle, too.” Sigma sighs. His voice doesn’t waver at all. Selfless bastard. “I couldn’t abandon you. I wouldn’t abandon you.”

“...Ha, I can see you doing that.” Phi’s smile is small, but when Sigma turns his glowing eye to her, she knows he sees it.

“So, do _you_ regret it?” Sigma raises one grey eyebrow. “If you could find yourself as a normal girl with a completely normal family, no SHIFT abilities or anything, would you?”

The thought is tempting, and Phi thinks over it for a moment. It rests in her heart like a possibility, a world that doesn’t exist where she wasn’t sent back in time when she was just a baby. It’s not real, though, and even on the moon, even sitting next to the person who created her and who tried and failed to save the world alongside her, she thinks that it would pull her in a direction she doesn’t like.

A history where she’s normal is a world where she didn’t get to live through all this. A world where she and Sigma are different. A world where the moon is meaningless, and someone else caused everything.

She breathes in fresh air. “You know what? I don’t think I would.”


End file.
